identifying emergence in complex systems

@thejunglejane

if you put 50 ants on a table

if you put 500,000 ants on a table

adding more ants

relatively simple

foraging for foodbuilding nestsraising livestock

waging warburying their dead

innate immune systemadaptive immune system

take the lower levels for granted

principle of computational irreducibility

the collective is irreducible to the individual

the whole must be greater than the sum of its parts

emergence

disorganized v. organized complexity

Per BakChao TangKurt Wiesenfeld

self-organized criticality

simpledistributedscalable

spend water to get water

collective regulation

ants are doing TCP

the independent discovery of TCP/IP, by humans

David Winter keepturningleft.co.uk

consensus

scale-free correlation

high signal-to-noise ratio

effective perceptive range

seven nearest neighbors

robustness

many evolutionary cycles in many different environments

natural selection for collective behavior

we have many biological analogs of computational problems

ants and congestion control

starlings and consensus

slime mold and network-routing

swarms and distributed search

neuronal spiking and probabilistic inference

fly brains and max independent sets

problem of representation

top-down feedback

simple and abstract

thank you